Page "Altruism" Paragraph 42

Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health and LABS-D ' Or Hospital Network ( J. M.

) provided the first evidence for the neural bases of altruistic giving in normal healthy volunteers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

In their research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in October, 2006, they showed that both pure monetary rewards and charitable donations activated the mesolimbic reward pathway, a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food and sex.

However, when volunteers generously placed the interests of others before their own by making charitable donations, another brain circuit was selectively activated: the subgenual cortex / septal region.

These structures are intimately related to social attachment and bonding in other species.

Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.